Month: September 2011

Is Obesity Preventable?

~ Clarissa ~ 41 Comments

I wasn’t going to blog about my annoyance with Shakesville for a while but when I see attacks on Jamie Oliver, one of my favorite chefs, I can’t keep silent. The blog is attacking Oliver for promoting healthy eating and healthy lifestyles:

So this morning I see that professional fat-hater Jamie Oliver has posted a petition which he’s asking people to sign in support of his “Food Revolution,” and in which he’s included the bullshit stat that “obesity in the US costs $10,273,973 per hour” (sure) and notes, in all-caps, “OBESITY IS PREVENTABLE.”

Celebrities who have signed the petition are posted in rotation: Jennifer Aniston, Eva Longoria, P. Diddy, Kim Kardashian, Ryan Seacrest, Ellen Degeneres.

It’s always nice to see wealthy people with access to the best food, comprehensive healthcare, personal trainers, private chefs, and individual nutritional plans put their names to a petition admonishing the fatties that OBESITY IS PREVENTABLE.

Stating the very obvious fact that obesity rates in this country are ridiculously high does not make you “a professional fat-hater.” It makes you a person who states the painfully obvious. You can talk as much as you want about obesity in the US being caused by “natural variation, poverty, and racism”. To do so, however, is to suggest – against all reason – that natural variation, poverty and racism do not exist anywhere else in the world. If they do but obesity doesn’t, then, obviously, something has got to be wrong with this entire line of reasoning.

The idea that only the rich people can avoid obesity is also completely ridiculous. Anybody who has taken the trouble of visiting other, poorer countries (or has at least watched a program or two about them on TV) must have noticed that millions upon millions of people in the world – who, incidentally, can’t even dream about “the best food, comprehensive healthcare, personal trainers, private chefs, and individual nutritional plans” – are not obese. One of the things you notice about the US when you visit it for the first time is the huge number of obese people that you do not encounter anywhere else in the world.

We can, of course, hide our heads in the sand, ostrich-like, and dub everybody who mentions this fact of objective reality a “fat-hater” and an eliminationist. Or we can start asking why a country where people have the standard of living that most of the world cannot even imagine has this great number of hugely overweight people. Until we start discussing the issue and not hiding behind the fake wall of quasi-acceptance, the reasons why this is happening will not be addressed.

The post I quoted then proceeds to compare obesity with homosexuality. Once again, this is a completely specious argument. The number of homosexual people all over the world does not vary from country to country or generation to generation. Nobody is implying, I hope, that you can only encounter gay people in one country during the lifetime of just a couple of generation of people. The terrifying rates of obesity in the US, however, are not shared across cultures and eras.

When I first started living in the US, I discovered that to maintain the same weight I had in Ukraine and then in Canada, I had to eat almost twice as little. When I moved to the Midwest, things got even worse. Something is wrong with the food (and the lifestyles) in this area. Of course, until we realize that American obesity isn’t just something that happens naturally, we will not be able even to begin finding out what it is that is wrong with the food we eat and the lifestyles we lead.

Remedial

~ Clarissa ~ 33 Comments

It’s only the second week of classes, and already I’m quite seriously behind. The reason is that there is so much remedial teaching I have to do that I keep running out of time before getting to the subject of the course.

It would be great if the students knew what the Roman Empire was, realized what the term “the Middle Ages” refers to, could find Mexico on a map, didn’t mix up Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, and were aware of the fact that the US did not exist in year 711. There are also problems with vocabulary, and I have to stop every two minutes to explain words like “indigenous,” “feudal,” “aqueduct,” “nomadic,” “synagogue,” “lyrical,” etc. Several students didn’t know how to spell the word “Muslim.” The weirdest version that it took me a while to decipher was “moslium.” Maybe this student thought I was referring to a chemical element like potassium or cadmium. Several students didn’t know what a mosque was.

Explaining all this devours class time like I can’t begin to tell you.

Language of Love

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

I’m not surprised that to the question “Which group of languages does Spanish belong to?” many students responded “Romantic languages.”

But when a student wrote that it belonged to the group called “Languages of Love”, that was kind of too much.

A Reason to Abolish USPS

~ Clarissa ~ 51 Comments

You know how USPS is often adduced as an example of a service provided by the government that is efficient, reliable, and used by everybody?

Well, I just discovered that Libertarians have a very bizarre argument in support of abolishing the USPS. Their argument – of all the thing in the world – is the environment. USPS, they say, delivers all those annoying ad circulars and commercial promotion packages. FedEx – an example of government-free truly commercial enterprise – doesn’t. This means that abolishing the USPS will not only reduce the government’s control over our lives but will also save the environment.

I have to say that of all the strange, convoluted Libertarian arguments I have had the misfortune of hearing this one is the most outlandish so far. “Let’s abolish the USPS to save the environment” is a very inventive argument. Of course, when you start coming up with something this weird, it’s a sign your position is quite untenable and you realize it.

Your Area’s Racial Makeup

~ Clarissa ~ 20 Comments

Thanks to feMOMhist I discovered this interactive map that shows you the racial makeup of your zip code area. Mine is: 98,1% of population is white. What’s yours?

The data in the map is based on the census. Press here to access the map and enter your zip code.

Learned Patterns of Behavior

~ Clarissa ~ 20 Comments

So I’m reading the Stupid Motivational Tricks Blog where Jonathan describes his system of grading students’ papers. Students send their papers to him by email and he enters corrections as comments in the Word document:

I never print anything. Students never print anything. I never have to struggle with my own handwriting. Students never struggle with my handwriting. I never lose a paper. Students never come late to class because they are still printing the paper due that day. I never struggle with a paper printed with an exhausted toner cartridge. Students get their papers back even if they are absent on the day papers are returned. I have an electronic record of the grades on each paper. The turn-over on papers is faster and more efficient. I never spill coffee on a student paper. Students can revise their papers by accepting my changes and going from there.

I never use this system. To the contrary, I’m a martinet when it comes to the way students hand in their papers. I insist that they never ever ever submit an essay in a file attachment. Essays have to be printed out and handed in to me in paper form. Then, I have to lug a heavy stack of essays around and try to fit my comments in between lines and on the margins.

And do you know why I use this inconvenient system instead of doing what Jonathan does and making my own life easier?

Because when I was a student my professors always insisted that papers be handed in to them in the paper format. I have no idea what the motivation behind this policy was (maybe people were simply uncomfortable with the Internet). I simply heard the exhortations not to send essays to the professor as a file attachment so many times that I started copying this practice in my own teaching.

Just think about how often we do things just because we’ve seen others do them and we simply imitate their actions unquestioningly.